This is the most important threads that RYPN has
ever had. "Clay320" -- thank you VERY much for
starting it.

Becky ---
Thank you VERY much for your excellent posts. You
made some incredibly important points. We can all
learn from them.

Two VERY important points:
1. Most RR museums have their mailing address located
quite far from the museum's physical location. That was
an excellent point about telling first responders your RR
museum's actual physical location, using good landmarks.

2. AT&T is going to end all land-line service by 2020, or
a few years later. I was told this by an AT&T customer
service rep some months ago. She said AT&T had
applied to the feds several; years ago for permission to
drop all land-line service by 2020, at the earliest, and that
permission to do that had been granted. So -- sooner or
later, land line service may not be available.

We Caljfornians rarely need to be concerned about severe
weather, but we DO need to be prepared for big quakes.
And forest fires -- because some famous tourist RRs do run
in our beautiful forests -- such as Roaring Camp, Yosemite
Mountain Sugar Pine RR, the Skunk Train.

I myself really hope that the FRA does very soon require all
RR museums and tourist RRs to have excellent emergency
response plans in place, and that all employees and volunteers
must be trained in such plans, and be re-certified annually. Such
training could and will save lives.

We Californians know that The Big One is coming, and all
of us -- including RR museums -- really need to be prepared
for it.

And, along those lines, I wanted to tell everyone that some
cities already have emergency disaster-response training
programs for ordinary residents. My local fire dept. calls it
"CERT" -- Community Emergency Response Training". It is
an excellent program. San Francisco's is called "NERT":
Neighborhood Emergency Response Training". BTW -- this
training is free. Mine lasts 6 weeks, and each session lasts
2 hours. If your RR museum does not yet have any kind of
emergency response training, at least take whatever CERT-
type training is offered in your community. CERT's philosophy
is that disasters will happen, and that it is much better to be
trained than untrained when one happens.

Thank you, Margaret! We have CERT here, but we haven't been able to go to our county's and the one across the river hasn't had theirs for a while.

Another thought: most of us are, after all, dealing with rail lines. It isn't a bad idea to look over any regular run and spot the places you can get emergency vehicles to the tracks if need be. Obviously, in case of a bad derailment they'll make a way, but for more or less routine matters like a sick passenger or criminal behavior, it's much easier to say "we'll stop at the farm lane straight across from the convenience store on Route 261."

There are several spots on our local rail lines and river where you'd be a whole lot better off to keep moving with an emergency on board than to stop and wait for EMS. Even if you're restricted to 20 MPH, it may still save time for you to run a couple of miles to a better access point than to stop where you'd need an awkward extrication.

It goes without saying that if moving the train is safe, you should move the train to a crossing where aid can reach you. Keep in mind that 911 is routed in peculiar ways, typically on cell phones it goes to the Highway Patrol, and this can be very congested. The 911 operators will assume you are on a freeway or road.

Also, whichever cell tower you pick up will decide whose district you are in. For instance at WRM it's very easy to grab a tower in Contra Costa county, which will route you to Contra Costa CHP, who serves 1 million people on the south side of the great river, and barely 500 on the north side, and probably would struggle to route you to local aid. (who regularly stations right at the museum, since it's the midway oasis in 20 miles of isolated highway.)

If there's anything we've learned about regional disasters, it's that they tend to affect a lot of people at once. Help may be a long distance, long time, or both. What's more, as we learned in Katrina and the Tohoku earthquake, secondary or tertiary causes can be worse than the initial event. For instance even the tsunami didn't kill Fukushima; They were on track and on time with a good plan, and focused on #2 and #3, assuming a bulletproof, passive cooling system on #1 was turned on. Which they could have easily turned on, or at least checked.

The upshot is your plan ought to plan for cascade failures, like what cuts your railroad bridge also cuts the highway bridge… and having to help yourselves for the first 48 hours.

In mass casualty situations, also, there's a history of disbelief or shock in the 911 operators themselves - if you say "plane crash" they can't BELIEVE it's an Airbus - you must be wrong, that just doesn't happen around here - and will assume it's a Harrison Ford and send 1 ambulance.

When AT&T says they are "cutting land line service by 2020" that means they are converting their existing wired network to entirely digital. Voice is just another kind of data. It's silly to run 2 miles of copper wire just for voice, since it is very low bandwidth, very low margin (Google Voice and Skype give it away for free), and the cellular networks can easily handle that traffic. Traditional telephones, powered from the central office, are wasteful in copper. If you want that, they'll hand you a powered box which is actually a VDSL modem with a built in MagicJack. Plug your old phone into it, and it seamlessly emulates traditional phone service, internally treated as VoIP, similar to Skype or Google Voice.

The point (aside from saving copper) is to dramatically increase the data bandwidth to you, to enable selling you high speed internet, TV, DVR, home security, cloud services and whatever else they can sell. They're competing absolutely square-on with Comcast (who I am using to describe all cable providers.) Like Comcast, their REAL business is selling broadband data. Comcast too is rejiggering their network to be bidirectional for data, and is also competing in the phone business.

Now how does that impact emergency services? When the powered box has no power, you have no phone. The network box is supplied with a power brick that is much larger than usual. It contains a backup battery. It's a cheaply built computer UPS that outputs 12VDC instead of 120VAC. It will power the network for a few hours. After that your cell phone better have a charge, and we know the cell network can overload during emergencies (or just be down). One option is to know how to turn off the UPS to conserve its battery (in advance, you're sure not going to find it in the dark). Of course that means you and staff need to be there to do it.

Also this only works with traditional passive phones, it STILL won't work with cordless or office phones that require AC power for their base stations to function. You often see UPS's on those, typically the computer variety, with a far shorter run-time intended only to let a server shut itself down in an orderly manner to avoid corrupting databases etc.

Is your battery tip-top? I see many whose batteries have silently lost their ability to hold a charge, and this is not discovered until H-hour. So part of your emergency plan must be prophylactic replacement of that battery - because mere testing leaves you vulnerable to it failing between tests.

One cure to the "no network box power" problem is have a 12v auxiliary power system on your site similar to an "off grid home", with a larger 12v battery of your own, solar panels, however you want to size the system. This is cheaper than you'd think for a small system. It could power other emergency or convenience services such as auxiliary lighting, exit lighting etc. In that case your survivability could be indefinite. The telephone central offices have generators.

If you have a diesel locomotive and fuel, you have a generator. Somebody on the property needs to know that and know how to be safe with it, including being sure there's no leaking or spilled fuel. The first rule in any reaction to emergencies is "Don't make things worse" and the second is "don't become part of the problem."

A solar panel big enough to run a cell-at-home box and some lights costs about $150. A solar phone charger is $10 and can sit in a windowsill until needed. Mine is also a flashlight. USB chargers are about the same price, but vary in reliability. Hand-cranked radios with chargers are less than $50 and often less than $20. Some places have been able to get grant money for full-bore rooftop solar panels to power lights and phones.

Knowing how many people are on your property and where they are can also be very important. That's why coal mines have such specific criteria for check-in and check-out and how the data is maintained. "The 2:30 run came back and everyone is on the evacuation bus" sounds fine, but where's the employee up at the other end of the line who stayed behind to lock up after the shop tour, and does he know the fire has shifted and you're all bugging out? There's a lot of bitterness on Class One roads about RFID tags and other employee-tracking technologies, but in a volunteer situation they could be really useful for locating everyone in the seconds after a quake or finding the guy who was working alone and isn't answering pages.

All excellent responses so far. A couple of additions:

*I am continually becoming more amazed at the sheer number of people that demonstrate to me that they are incapable of navigating their way out of a cardboard box without a GPS-enabled "smart phone," or incapable of finding a place that doesn't have an address easily entered as a road number. (Just the other day I came upon someone who followed Google Maps directions to the letter and found themselves at a closed bridge--and couldn't figure out the ridiculously obvious detour.) Do yourselves a favor, and go find a couple of these folks that you can legally use as guinea pigs (your teens, for example), and present them with emergency scenarios. As they try to look up the answer, take their phone/tablet. What happens after that MAY reveal some hazards or flaws in your planning because you, the folks who grew up with paper maps and dead reckoning and know the place, already know this stuff intuitively. An unfamiliar person dependent upon a screen, not so much.

*Your situation will vary immensely depending on your setting. An inner-city museum like the B&O Museum or the Baltimore Streetcar Museum is in a totally different situation from, say, Cass, the East Broad Top, or the Cumbres & Toltec. And a professional operation like the Grand Canyon or Strasburg is different from the volunteer local depot museum.
Emergency response personnel are there for a reason. In most cases, they will welcome a chance to work with you to identify potential problems and strategize a plan. At an extreme, they'll even schedule a time to clear the fire-break you'll need in wildfire territory, or assign an EMT to your big event.

*Some excursion lines have participated with staging disaster-training scenarios for emergency personnel, for both freight and passenger emergencies. Is this something you can or should do? Maybe you can "derail" that piece you're about to scrap anyway, and let the personnel train on it before the scrappers arrive--the windows are busted, the frame bent, door jammed, etc.; who cares if they "cut" the car to rescue someone?

This is one this the biggest issues I have seen with the group I volunteer with. I can't remember a time in the 5 years I've been here that we have had to call 911, but I do know from disgruntled lost passengers that GPS and railroads don't work well together. GPS is good at correctly assigning addresses to roads, but not so much to the old railroad yard on the edge of town.

This carries over to 911 dispatchers as well, the GPS systems that they use are often not much more robust than what is in your pocket. Often our track doesn't show up on GPS "non terrain" maps as our line is only used for our operation, and some maps don't show us as a "real railroad" or like to write "abandoned" next to our line on the map. So with all those issues if I call and say "we hit a car at Staib Road" 911 might not know where our crossing is on that road. This is magnified when we are out on the line away from crossings, 911 won't know where our bridge is in the middle of the woods or how to get to Farmer Johns tractor crossing.

I agree completely with the fact that in todays society absolutely none of the "Kids" in my generation can get away without having a cell phones out or even keeping still without doing something on said cell phone and it is actually really sad. Just the fact that people cant read a physical map to find out where they are makes it even worse. The people of today are so unprepared for an emergency it is not even funny, if you look at my original post from last week that actually started this conversation 'Severe weather in Illinois' you can find articles that say people were just filming the EF4 tornados as they were going through their neighborhoods instead of getting into their basements and safety. The people of today are completely ridiculous.

I've often thought that nobody under 21 should be permitted to own or operate a cell phone or similar gadget to give them time to learn the older ways and demonstrate basic life skills competence before going to the technological shortcuts. I know a lot of highly educated people with damn few practical skills to use when the technology is unavailable or disfunctional.

dave

Edited to add: whoops, here's the Storm Ready chart I meant to put up:
http://www.stormready.noaa.gov/guideline_chart.htm

Google Earth can be your friend when it comes to teaching map reading. A large print of your facility (or a big aerial photograph) put side by side with a map may get the idea across. Granted, you can do a more dramatic version by zooming in during a presentation, but there's a lot to be said for putting a map where people have to walk by it every day. If they're not allowed to use cell phones on the property, they'll be bored enough to look at the walls.

One of the most helpless, frightening periods of my life wasn't even one of our own emergencies. It was watching Hurricane Sandy home in on New York, knowing that none of the young women (on Ravelry) I had tried to warn were taking me seriously and that they were the tip of a very large iceberg of clueless people about to get hit. There's a lot of planning for asteroid strikes and zombie attacks, but no useful plans for what happens most often. Making a list of the most likely emergencies and going up to the least likely is one of those things we can all work on. For instance, just dealing with first aid, you might need:

OTC painkillers for a minor headache or arthritis: fairly often
Minor wound care (tiny cuts, skinned places): fairly often
Upset stomach/heartburn remedies: fairly often
Care for a strained or sprained joint: not as often
Heimlich maneuver for choking: much less often
Care for a blow to the head from a fall: not often, we hope
Care for multiple injuries from a fall: still less often
Care for a heart attack or stroke: not at all often if we're lucky
Care for a severe accident involving full trauma response: we hope not
Response to a severe, widespread, multiple casualty incident, God forbid

...but guess what we train for the most? Yep. We start at this end of the list and work up to the minor everyday things. Since the attention span now is measured in microseconds, most people tune out of first aid right after "take the AED out of the case and..." If we start with Band-Aids, we might get results.

This brings up yet another issue.

Do you have/carry First Aid kits?

And if so, what do you do with it?

I once worked with a convention that had about twenty thousand people for three days. In a crowd that big, you are all but guaranteed to have a medical issue somewhere. Yet, despite the fact that we had several staff members with medical training (CPR, etc.), the non-profit's legal team drilled it into the staff's heads repeatedly that we were not to so much as even TOUCH an attendee, let alone render first aid. We were to leave that to the two EMTs that were on hand back at command central. The row between the lawyer covering posteriors and would-be good Samaritans got fairly acrimonious and contentious--the difference between administering proper aid promptly versus waiting for the "authorized" folks could have meant the difference between life and death. Fortunately, as far as I know, that issue has never been put to so extreme a test so far. (I was one of several that quit the group, in part because of that stupidity. I worked the last convention with the unwritten understanding that if such an emergency arose I was to remove my staff badges as an act of official resignation first.)

The same could go with those at a museum or on a ride. What do you do when someone with an allergy gets stung by a bee, as happened with one line-reopening trip I saw? (A local ambulance was summoned by CB radio and met the train at a crossing.) Or someone stumbles as a train lurches, and twists an ankle or bangs their jaw or bruises the elbow? Or the old cliché, a cinder in the eye? Do you help them? Break out the first aid kit and administer first aid? Hand the passenger or his fellow riders the first aid kit? Call an ambulance and a lawyer, and lock everyone aboard the cars?

As much as I may understand and sympathize with the mentality that drives a "don't touch anyone ever" approach, I can't help but think that such an "uncaring" or "hostile" approach towards a victim and the family/friends makes the place look not only cold, callous, and uncaring, but guilty as heck in addition.

A good idea is to invite the local first responders to your site and show them the access routes, etc. Do this on a regular basis as the local staff can change from year to year.

Years ago, after the head-on incident at National Capital, this was one of the recommendations that the NTSB asked both TRAIN and ARM to distribute to their members.

Something that needs to be considered - if there are 300 passengers and observers who see or are involved in an incident, there may be dozens of calls made to 911. Many of those calling won't have a clue about what is going on.

We had a mishap on a 1/8 scale live steam railroad where a car or two derailed and tipped over and a child was injured several years ago. Before the scope of the incident became clear, the emergency responders thought they were responding to a full-sized train wreck on the nearby railroad and the turnout of emergency equipment was spectacular. Part of the confusion may have been because the staff was trying to render aid at the same time at least one of the riders made the call to 911.

Someone on the staff needs to be tasked to communicate with the emergency responders immediately, rather than have all the staff try and deal with the emergency. There should be a plan for who on staff is responsible for the call. The responders will react whether there is a real emergency or just something that a panicked passenger perceives as an emergency.

Here's a thought: can you throw a First Responders' Appreciation Day with free admission for local police, fire and EMS, including county dispatchers? Show them around and take them on a ride--it doesn't have to be one of your premier excursions.

It's one thing to have the emergency management director make an official visit and another to have paramedics who would think "Hey, I know where they mean. It's where the train stops by the playground."

When I was at TVRM, we did consider the issue of coordinating emergency responses with the local fire and rescue services. One major issue was the lack of access to the line except at the stations and two (possibly three) locations along the line-two of which were private crossings.

In case of severe weather during operations, crews were instructed to run at restricted speed looking out for downed trees and damage to the roadbed. If the weather occurred when the railway was closed, the crew would take a motorcar out before the first train ran to inspect the line.

If a passenger or employee were to be injured, first aid was to be administered and all off property trips carried first aid kits. First aid kits were also maintained in the stations and the shop. Accident reporting kits were carried on all off property trains and maintained at designated locations on the railway. The kits included important telephone numbers, a tape recorder with extra tapes and batteries, a disposable camera and accident report forms. On off property trains, the kit was carried in the commissary car as the responsibility of reporting accidents is that of the Conductor.

Contingency plans are very important. On one Christmas trip, a switch that was in bad condition caused a derailment of the steam locomotive and diesel. As the trip was sold out and none of the cars derailed, a second locomotive was run from the shop and coupled to the other end of the train to pull the cars. Shuttle busses were quickly arranged to deliver the passengers from the old Terminal Station to the train and return them upon completion of the trip. Another time our Downtown Arrow was stuck downtown overnight due to damage to the track-an automobile had jumped the curb fleeing police and pulled up 100+ feet of rail (due to the condition of the crossties at the time). Solution? The local train was finishing up its last trip of the day. Two diesel locomotives were coupled to the consist-one at each end as there was no place to run around the train. The rescue train arrived and the passengers walked around the damaged track to get to it.

Here at Old Pueblo Trolley, we have worked with the Tucson Fire Department to train their staff to safely work around electric railway equipment. When we were operating the power transmission system, we had indicator lights installed to indicate whether or not the overhead 600v power was on. The fire department instructed their men to always consider the line hot but to confirm the status of the line by noting the status of the indicator lights and contacting our officers if there was any doubt. This was not just for dealing with our operations but dealing with any emergency callouts they might have at anytime, since our line operated exclusively in the public roadway.